The second thing you should do is try to use Music Brainz or something paid like SongKong or Jaikoz to identify your songs and fix the metadata.

I use Jaikoz and I haven't figured out how to use Jaikoz to organize file names and directories properly.

(this replaces spaces with underscores, which I don't like much, but other than that it's great as it tries to replace non ascii with ascii equivalent.)

FROM BELOW HERE IT'S INFO I DON'T USE ANYMORE, AS I NOW USE LINUX

If you feel like organizing all those
music files on your computer, this article is for you.

I'm gonna assume you have a certain
level of tech knowledge.

You need to know only simple stuff. If
you already know that filenames have extensions (“.mp3”, “.ogg”)
and that Windows hides those extensions from users by default, but
that Windows and other operating systems actually need those
extensions to know how to open files, then you'll have no problems
and I'm sorry to have bothered you here. If not, good luck, you'll
probably need it.

I'm going to try to write an article
that won't grow old, so even tho I will give examples of software you
might want to try for each function, I will always describe the
purpose of things, so you can look for yourself for alternatives to
the software I'll be using.

The things that you have to worry about
are basically the music file itself, the metadata, and the data.

The file is the location of the file
(its directory) and the filename.

The medata is all the information about
the file. This includes stuff like album, year, genre, but also can
include the lyrics and the nice album art picture.

The data is the music data itself. This
is the mp3, ogg, wma, flac sound information, and also, the
information of how it was encoded (encoder, encoding quality,
encoding type, etc)

To fix the filenames means organizing
the files themselves, putting them in a nice directory structure so
you don't have to dig all around your hard drive, and changing the
filenames to something that easily identifies the music within, so
you can move the file around without any problems, like having to
open it to identify it.

To fix the metadata means fixing what
you get to know when you open a sound file in an adequate player.
Ideally, with good metadata, even without internet, you get to know
mostly everything about the file. It also helps a lot when you are
creating mixes in adequate software. To fix this requires adequate
software that is capable of identifying a track automatically, or,
manual work on your part to identify the tracks from an online
repository. This is the information that is used to fix the
filenames.

To fix the data. If you are not looking
to improve the quality of your tracks, you shouldn't worry about
this. But if your song collection has some old files in it, you
should give this some attention, as old free encoders were really
bad. Files with less than 160kpbs are a big no-no for anyone that
listens to a lot of music and can tell the difference. And a lot of
people are replacing their collection with lossless FLAC files. Truth
be told about this, even tho a FLAC file is lossless, it is lossless
in reference to the CD version. And the CD quality is usually not on
par with the actual studio recording. That's something to remember.
The data is what is used to identify the song, either by you or by
adequate software, to get the metadata.

So, if you were paying attention, you
will have understood two things.

The first thing is that we don't
organize a music collection for the sake of organizing. Organizing is
supposed to make the thing more enjoyable and easy to use.

The second thing is that it's a cyclic
process, you need the music data to then get the metadata to then
create a nice file structure. After you have that you might want to
look into the music data again to see if you have any bad quality
files. And so it starts over again (although in a smaller scale).

Now that we have the concepts of what
we are trying to do, we have to look at our collection.

It's probably a bit organized already.

The first question is. Do you have
strong preferences regarding directory and filename structure?

This is tricky. You see, the music
download scene has its own naming scheme. Usually it goes like,

artistName\ artistAlbum\ trackNumber. –
trackTitle

an example:

Sia\Best of..\10. Bring Night.mp3

See that? I personally don't like that
very much. Cause if just copy a few songs from a few albums to make
myself a mix, I wont know what I'm looking at. And I won't be able to
sort out the files by artist.

So yeah, what I prefer is:

artistName\artistAlbum\artistName
trackNumber trackTitle

so it becomes

Sia\Best of...\Sia 10 Bring Night.mp3

Now I can copy that file around, and
I'll always know what that file is. Plus, it will still be sorted
neatly inside the album directory. It will also be sorted neatly
inside a mix directory. Bonus for elegance.

But, what if you already have a
directory with a lot of songs by different artists? If you use this
organizing method you'll end up with too many album directories with
only one song, and artist directories with only one album with only
one song. That looks nasty to me.

So, when I only have one song from an
artist it goes to the my _misc directory

_misc\artistName trackNumber trackTitle

like so

_misc\Ladytron 06 Blue Jeans

But, if I have a couple songs an album,
I'll just keep them in the artist folder, like so

artistName\artistName trackNumber
trackTitle

Deftones\Deftones 04 Change

Notice that this way you can have
albums directories and music files inside the artist directory.

This is all just a suggestion. What you
have when you get an .mp3 directory from the web, is usually good
enough. And unless you want to be troubled to mess in settings,
organizing software creates a lot of one file folders by default.

Summarizing, the main ideas in
organizing music filenames:

- all the songs by the same artist will
be in the same place;

- the song file can be moved around and
you can know where it belongs in the structure, just by reading the
filename;

If you have hundreds of artists in your
collection you could organize your artists by genre or decade or
whatever, but I advise against it. Just use a Music Library software,
like Media Monkey, or good old MusicIP.

So we now have an end result in mind.
To get to that we need to correct the metadata. To easily correct the
medata the easiest and most error-free way is to use something called
audio fingerprinting.

Audio fingeprinting is a process of
identifying a track from the sound that it generates. So you can have
different encodes of the same track generating the same fingerprint.

This is extremely nice, because this
way you can just compare the fingerprints of your tracks to an online
library and get all the metadata you need. Thankfully there exists
some freeware that does exactly this. MusicBrainz is the most famous.
But I still prefer the swiss army knife that is MusicIP.

Just open it, add your songs, wait for
it to fingerprint them, and click on the “Fix Tags” button. You
can and should go to the preferences to tell it what tags you want to
be fixed (usually just pick all of them in their simplified forms).

If you have any troubles, I made a wiki
from the MusicIP manual.

The software that does the audio
fingerprinting usually has a file renaming / restructuring function
that is easy to use. It just changes the filename and directory
according to the metadata, to some general structure that you define.

One Very Important Note: There are lots
of rare songs that wont be identified, and won't have metadata in
them. If you apply this proccess to them, it will change their
filename into something empty, and sometimes you will stop knowing
anything about the song. I've had this happen to a few asian songs).
A solution is to edit metadata yourself. It's always best to have at
least basic metadata in all your files.

A note about Unicode. Filenames that
have non-english characters in them will present some problems
sometimes. For example, this is MusicIP's weakness. It supports
unicode, but not in

filenames. My advice is, if you have
the option, to romanize when you can.

Software like Jaikoz, although it's not
free, has no problem with unicode. Also, Jaikoz is really good, it
will get you the lyrics, the album art and whatnot, and the best part
about is that it tries to use all of the free services available to
accomplish its fingerprinting. It's the best I know of, right now.

Summarizing, to correct metadata you
need internet and an audio fingerprinting software. Then you use that
fingerprint to retrieve the metadata.

You can use metadata to correct
filenames / file structure. When doing this, be careful about
non-english characters in your metadata and be very careful about
auto-correcting files without any metadata.

If you followed through this until now,
you already have the knowledge to get an organized music collection.
Congratulations.

Now for the bonus rounds.

Corrupted files and Duplicates.

Corrupted files. Corrupted files are a
bit tricky. Software that doesn't support unicode will report files
as being corrrupted, so don't trust those. Also, there's plenty of
software that does this, but with the negative side of being filetype
specific. MusicIP for example, reports as corrupt, songs that are too
short. Anyway, the mission is simple, find and delete, and possibly
replace with a good version.

Duplicates are easy, just find files
with the same fingerprint. Audio fingerprinting software usually has
a function such as this. Don't trust software that uses
filename/metadata to find duplicates. Another important note,
remember to delete the files with the worst quality. A good rule is
to delete the one with the least kpbs. Although there is a lot to be
said about quality.

Quality

Quality is an interesting subject. If
you use software like Encspot on your collection you will find which
files were created using what encoder. It will also tell you about
the relative quality of those files. It's a bit dated and .mp3
oriented, so you might want to look into alternatives.

But it's as simple as this. Better
encoding quality, up to a certain quality level, equals better music.

On the other hand remember not to go to
extremes, and that sometimes some dofus somewhere will just encode a
92kbps .wma file to FLAC and call it lossless. So be careful.

My advice is if you have a song that
you like that is low quality, get a new version. You can use MusicIP
or Encspot to find these low quality songs.

Gain and clipping

Gain is how much louder or lower you
play a sound. It's like pre-applied volume. Clipping is what happens
when you try to ouput a signal higher than what is supported by the
system. It just maxes out the ability of the system to produce sound.
It's really bad for encoding and it sounds really bad in decoding.
There's a few ways to deal with this.

ReplayGain is the best. This just finds
out what the volume of the track is, and the necessary gain to avoid
clipping. Then it adds that value to the metadata and any player that
supports ReplayGain won't clip the song.

The bad side? Most hardware players
don't support replaygain :(

So you may consider using something
such as Mp3Gain to actually apply the gain directly to the music
data.

The main advantages of this process?

- Clipping sounds bad, so this will
make your music sound better.

- Your songs will now all have the same
volume. You wont need to adjust the volume dial anymore (or use other
any auto-volume adjusting features).

Now that we have covered mostly
everything, it's time to debate this a bit. If I had to give an
advice, I wouldn't recommend this to you. It's much easier to delete
what you have and just get a full artist discography from the
internet and find out that most of it is already organized and of
good quality. But truth be told, not everyone knows this stuff, so
even the stuff you get from the web won't be well organized. Plus, if
you want the stuff that is rare, you won't be so lucky.

Also it's not very convenient to this
to a large unorganized collection.

Now it's fashionable to use streaming
services instead of having a collection. If you ask me what I think
about them, I think they're great, but they trap you in them, don't
forget it.